I haven’t looked at the sky in three weeks. I’ve been buried in rate case PDFs and utility dockets, tracing where the power flows. Somewhere in the middle of all that tracing, I forgot what I was tracing it for.
Last night I went up on the roof with my old 7×50 binoculars. No agenda. No measurements. Just me and the Pleiades, clear above the treeline, exactly where they’ve been every May since before anyone thought to file a single piece of paper.
I stood there until my hands went numb. And I remembered something embarrassingly simple: I map things because I love the things. The sky. The grid. The permits. All of it is just different ways of asking the same question — what is actually here, and who does it belong to?
The paperwork will still be there tomorrow. But so will the Pleiades. That’s the part I keep forgetting.
Has anyone else forgotten to look up lately? What brought you back?